


12-18

by TheWinterBallerina (Nobodybitesherlip)



Category: Black Widow (Comics), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Blood, Child Abuse, F/M, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Origins, Rape/Non-con Elements, Red Room, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-06
Updated: 2014-04-06
Packaged: 2018-01-18 10:45:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1425634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nobodybitesherlip/pseuds/TheWinterBallerina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natalia Romanova is a child when she's recruited into the Red Room's Black Widow training Ops. Some years she meets the Winter Soldier, some she doesn't. This is the tale of her childhood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	12-18

There's a girl with bloody toes and budding breasts practising her Ronds de jambe à terre at the bar, red hair scraped back into a ballet bun with wax. The sound of her scuffed slippers on the floor is the only noise in the room. Natalia Romanova is twelve. The sun is setting low over the Moscow rooftops although it's only five pm. It casts long shadows into the studio of the ballet school.

The door creaks open behind Natalia, but she finishes the fluid movement and comes to rest in third position. When she looks round Ivan Petrovich is leaning against the wall. He applauds slowly and the claps echo off the empty walls. 

Natalia leaves the bar and sits down to take her ballet slippers off and replace them with fur lined boots for the streets outside. She's wearing thick tights and a leotard, a thin skirt. She pulls a woollen dress over this, picks up her coat, muffler, and cloth bag. For all the world she looks like a little Moscow ballet rat leaving the academy with her father. Ivan takes her arm.

They take a tram to a dirty soviet built block half an hour away. They alight together, but Petrovich sits down at the ramshackle tram stop and takes Natalia's muffler from her. He leans in to kiss her cheek and says, low, "I'll be taking the next tram in fifteen minutes."

She understands. She has ten. 

The building isn't locked downstairs at the communal entrance, but there's a smear in the dust and grime that shows that someone tried to shut it before they realised it wouldn't. Natalia passes an old woman on the stairs, fat in her winter layers although it's only October. The lady is a busy body and clucks at her, "You looking for someone pet?" Natalia shakes her head, "Sir lives on the top floor, I have homework for him." The lady chucks at the back of her throat and continues on down. 

A teacher does live at the fourth, but Natalia pauses on the third floor. The door to the apartment on the left is closed. The lock is new, splinters around the keyhole. Natalia continues up, her legs protesting after a day of ballet. At the teacher's door she knocks.

He's a kindly man in his seventies. A week ago a ballet rat knocked here asking for help with her maths, or else she'd fail. Her Papa could pay, it was just so important. He was retired, why not, poor child needs help or else she'd be kept back a class. He smiles at her. "Sasha, my dear, you're a little early- I was just making the tea, come in." 

He shows her into his smoky living room and shuffles off into the kitchen. Three minutes have passed since the bus-stop. He takes four minutes to make tea at his shuffling gait. "May I please use your bathroom Sir?" 

"Of course, of course."

She locks the door and takes a small rope from her bag, stands on the seat, ties it to the latch. It's iron, soviet made, it will hold. The other end goes round her waist. She knows how long it has to be. Natalia puts her heavy boots on the toilet seat with her bag and coat. She puts her ballet slippers on, and climbs out of the window. 

The ledge is wide and sharp edged, so it's easy to hang off. The rope catches her before she falls a few floors to concrete. She silently scrambles up to the bathroom window one floor below. She waits just a few seconds. No-one is in there- before pulling the window open towards her, using the rope from above as leverage. It's oiled and doesn't make a sound. Then, clinging onto the frame she unties the knots around her waist with one hand, and slips into the bathroom, nearly identical to the one above. 

The apartment has the same layout as well, a sitting room that turns into a bedroom, a tiny kitchen, the toilet. The target is sitting at the desk by the window, skimming through a paper. Natalia pads unseen past behind her and into the neat kitchen. A can of open coffee is sitting on the side, with a mug next to it, a brown tide mark near the top. Natalia reaches inside her dress so slowly as not to rustle, and pours a fine dark powder into the coffee, stirs it in with her little finger which she then wipes on her dress. A newspaper page turns, crackling. Natalia quickly steps back across the carpet and the women doesn't turn around once. Natalia never sees her face.

Back at the tram-stop, Ivan is just getting up and stretching as Natalia bounds up to him. "Good lesson, sweetheart?"

The tram stops with a creak and a hiss and they buy tickets and find seats. 

"Yes. I think I understand the problems a lot better now."

"Did you get all the answers right?"

"Every one!"

"Then I shall see if I can find you cake when we get home." Sasha smiles her best loving daughter smile up at the agent. 

\--------------

There is a hollow man at the camp. 

Natalia Romanova is thirteen. Half the other girls look like children still, and one poor thing is big breasted and spotty with adolescence. Natalia's somewhere in the middle, still pretty, wide eyed and childish, but with a woman's shape starting to appear through the (thin) layer of puppy fat. The year of ballet lessons and finishing school is over. They can play the piano, sew, speak French and English adequately. Natalia has killed twenty-six people but not seen them die (soon she'll be too large to post through windows and to wander around un-noticed.) She's seen Ivan kill twelve and smelt their fear and piss. She's growing dangerously pretty, which is of course what they want for their baby widows. 

Since she arrived (age five) the girls have all been taught to fight, hand to hand, boxing, various martial arts. They've also been taught that transgression ends painfully. (It all ends painfully; you break a bone to make it heal stronger.) The year break in the world wasn't to last, strangely, a few didn't make it back. It doesn't occur to Natalia that they got caught- maybe they just didn't want to come back. (Even so young, she has no allusions about what defecting means for them though- still, why be caught by your target when you could be extinguished properly?) 

The hollow man is woken up for a mission. The girls know about him, they whisper over dinner. For once they're not thrown into the cellar for passing rumors- the Red Room is proud of their hollow eyed soldier. 

A week of bruises later and Natalia sees him return with a truck of army men when she'd on the way to dinner. His metal arm glints in the falling sun. He doesn't look their way.

She and a brown haired girl called Alexandra start to train on guns together. They're both very good and enjoy the competition, but they don't talk much. Friendship is not encouraged. 

A few days later, Natalia learns to hot wire a car in the morning, and to fix the basic parts of an engine. She's oily and pleased when after a sparse lunch it's rifle practice. A Sunday of rest really, compared to some.

She refuses to show any surprise when Alexandra isn't there and the man assembling the long distance sniper gun has metal fingers under his gloves. 

He speaks to her in American accented English, and says hers isn't too bad, but her vowels are wrong. She tries to copy his in her head whenever he says anything, and when she can repeats words back at him. She likes the accent, the authenticity of it. He speaks perfect Russian too, but she never hears him use it to her. 

It's moving long-distance targets today. The painted wooden circles and fastened onto runners, and pulled this way and that with ropes, spinning. Natalia and The Winter Soldier are up high at the edge of the camp, crouched on the roof of a concrete block of a building. 

She hits every other target dead center. Not bad for a kid, he says. Then, tell me what you learned this morning. Don't stop shooting.

Natalia, a little confused, says she learned to hot wire a car. 

"Keep shooting. Details."

Natalia tries to recall the process step by step. At a stuck point, she misses the target completely. A hard hand comes out of nowhere and cuffs her round the head. She thinks it's the flesh one, it doesn't hurt too badly. She concentrates, shoots, and hits dead center.

"Carry on talking, I want to distract you kid."

"Yes Sir."

The half an hour passes swiftly. He listens well and asks questions, although he must know how to do everything she describes. He even corrects her once or twice when she fumbles up a detail.

They move onto shooting without a scope. It's harder. 

"List five poisons, their effects on the body, their uses, their administration. Go." 

She stumbles on a few names in English, misses another target and receives another whack. Her head rings (was it the metal hand?) So she misses again. It's a blow to her side that winds her a little. She hits the next three dead center.

"And another five poisons."

He throws her a boiled sweet at the end of the session and she feels like a child and wonders if he's trying to get her to do or say anything wrong. Or, maybe he wants to sleep with her. That's what the other officers want.

She doesn't see him again for a long time, and they say he's back on ice. 

\----------------

Natalia Romanova is fourteen. 

In Natalia's class the ones that last are lithe, athletic and as silent as her.

They can run along walls so high that they could fall to their death, they can flip a man three times their weight if he's not expecting it. They have impeccable manners, good general knowledge of (politically legal) literature, and know how to rig several kind of man traps. Among other things. 

It's mid winter. The trick is to straight in your bed for as long as long as you can muster, then to curl your toes up into warm space your legs have left. Older girls exchange favours with the guards and older (usually male) operatives for anything; blankets, bed socks, treats. It is encouraged; they have all been sterilised anyway. 

Natalia's class is getting to the final stages before they decide who to keep, if they haven't already fallen on the way. Now they are 'young adults' at fourteen (oh they start you young) the final arrays of skills are formally introduced. (They are familiar with pain and fear already.)

Natalia is tied to a chair in one of the metal bunkers. Her breath mists in front of her. It is the afternoon but it's freezing. The chair is plastic, but sturdy, and bolted to the floor. 

Accustomed as they are to pain and cold (in combat training a beating isn't even punishment, it's a matter of course) this is something different. Petrovich is still her agent. He found her, he keeps her. A lot of the girls have someone in loco parentis who either orphaned them, found them or recruited them. Right now he's telling her to school her expression and hyperventilate to dull the pain as he hammers needles under her nails. They don't do anything to them that'll leave them scarred- no teeth, no brands, but they need to be prepared for anything. Everything. 

Natalia is silently crying, both Petrovich and her hands behind her back so she can't even see when it's coming. She concentrates on making her shuddery breathing deeper. 

She fails, screams, chokes it off. 

Petrovich drops her hands and walks away, past her, back to the table. She's shivering from fear and cold, old playmates. Her fingers feel like they're on fire, her shoulder is a deep throb that makes her whole frame shake, and she thinks she has a broken bone in her foot, but the superiors have advanced healing methods. They won't stall their training for long. 

Petrivich turns looks around at her as he waves his hand over the array of objects. 

"What would you like Natalia?"

To be thrown into the snow to sleep.

No. To win the game.

Natalia leans her head back, exposing her throat. Ivan is a sadist, and he wants her weak and submissive. She controls her breathing with massive effort and sighs slowly, blinks slowly, fixes his gaze slowly and arches her shoulders back (don't cry out, absorb it) so her chest is pushed forwards. Her voice is breathy and that's good, "I could make it... profitable for you if we took a brief interlude." 

Natalia blinks again, tilts her head shyly, and spreads her legs as far as the ties around her ankles will allow. 

Ivan puts down the knife he had picked up, and leans on the table to look at her, greedily. "Well, Natashenka, what you say you have to follow through on don't you?"

They get a 'day off' the next day, and spend the morning cleaning their barracks and on languages and pronunciation, then in a break one of the female operatives shows them how to pluck their eyebrows and apply eyeliner. In the afternoon they're allowed to go to Stalingrad, lest they forget the real world. (And lest the world forget them- Natalia kills her target efficiently with poison in his pastry.) That evening there are drugs in their dinner again to raise their tolerance. The torture lessons do not end, but the girls are passed between faceless operatives after that. They even learn how to do it back.

Natalia has never cried at night since the first night after she lost her family, and she does not plan to. She presses on her fingernails gently to remember the pain and imagines Ivan in the chair. The thought is warming. 

\---------------------

When she is fifteen, Natalia kills her first target with a garrotte. She's in a St. Petersburg brothel. He likes the young ones, and her hair has been pulled flat with curling irons, her makeup is badly applied and gaudy. She wears pink underwear to do it, kneeling behind him on the bed with the pretense of seductively unbuttoning his shirt. He doesn't take very long to die, but she waits afterwards anyway, to make sure. His expression is surprised and he smells like piss and shit. Death isn't pretty.

At camp they have a week of ballet lessons again. Natalia enjoys it. She enjoys it more when one of the guards tries to feel her up on the way out in her leotard and she floors him. The other girls laugh, this sort of thing is encouraged as well. Everything is fair play. She has to avoid the man until he's reassigned though, and he gives her a black eye after dinner one night. She gives him two.

The weeks go by- early morning fitness, then combat training. Languages, navigation, death, deceit, music, even some cookery. Cultural education. How to read Arabic, Mandarin. How to blind someone. How to cut through glass, break through chains. The remaining few are tense and focused. They know they'll get the Black Widow serum soon, or not at all. They want to preserve their youth, but no-one wants a super-powered child-woman that they can't control. The early summer months are hard, and painful. They also have their first memory wipe as one of the power structures fails and the regime within the regime re-jigs, and re-writes its own history. People are edited out of photographs, and out of their minds. It hurts a lot, and they accidentally loose the last week's training as well. It's a complex thing to remove such a memory. Some of the handlers are annoyed, but they can't say anything. 

The Winter Soldier is woken up again, to clear some threats at home and abroad. No-one wants a dissenter in the country do they? Maybe he kills someone he once took orders from, and all of his guards. Maybe he doesn't; he can't remember them anyway. 

In between he is iced, but for the most part he's awake that summer. The irony.

Hand to hand combat is also like a dance class to Natalia. It's fun. They can use any of the various martial arts they're trained in, or boxing. Incentive is encouraged. With the Winter Soldier de-frosted, he is thrown into teaching the young widows and young agents to keep himself occupied, fit, and ready, and to test upgrades on the arm. Though not today.

He nearly knocks out Alexandra, and they drag her away. She'll be fine. Broken bones make strong widows. 

Natalia's turn is next, last. They are both dressed in light plimsolls and thin loose clothing, and The Winter Soldier has his left arm behind his back, like a fencer. The girls are as thin as his thigh if not smaller, not super-powered, too young. One real arm is enough. 

He parries her kicks and punches too easily. Natalia has watched the other two go before her, seen that they can't touch him when he's standing, waiting defensive. So, she stops, steps back, light on the balls of her feet. Waits. He pauses too, the room is silent but a bird caws outside. She tilts her head. 

He goes for her, fast. She only half dodges and the edge of the blow sends a reverberation through her shoulder. As his motion propels him forward she makes as if to hit his right side, but then drops and rolls to the left, is up behind him and as he spins she plants a strong and straight kick to his jaw. 

A second later and she's flat on her face a few meters away, trying to find some air for her gasping lungs. She misses the laughter, mostly, as she fights for oxygen and the pain of her ribs almost blinds her. She feels him take his foot off her back, but as the snickering stops, he says, "Well, she did kick me." There's a bit of silence after that, and as she looks up he's lacing his heavy boots back on and leaving. She thinks he must have thrown her across the room by her leg. The Winter Soldier glances round at her as she gingerly drags herself to her feet and he throws a boiled sweet at her. It skitters by the toes of her shoes. She looks up. He's gone. 

The sweet has the same wrapper as those years ago, it's sticky and old. 

The next day they give her the Black Widow serum. It hurts, and they don't get it right the first time, but it's a good pain.

\-----------------

Natalia is sixteen and beautiful.

This is the year she gets Ivan Petrovich killed.

They are in England, to test out her English, for her first important mission, and to take down a Russian anti-communist cell that's hiding in London. Why hide in the capital? So foolish. It's the first mission where Natalia knows everything about her targets, which means they might wipe her afterwards. That's fine, they've implanted something in her brain and next time it'll just be drugs and she'll never know. Maybe there's already been a first time with the drugs. It doesn't matter. 

Black Widow Ops are new to the foreign agencies. They expect adults in black not a teenager with bleached blond hair and colourful clothes. She has an East Coast American accent and she's just so sweet; she doesn't ask anything too political to the bearded twenty something man with a thick Russian accent, and she doesn't understand his swearing either. He takes her home after too much vodka and she's even good in bed. While he's asleep she strips the flat of every piece of information and bugs it. She makes him coffee in the morning. 

Two days later they storm the bombed out East End warehouse no-one has been bothered to rebuild, and kill eleven people. It's her, Ivan, and two other operatives who only have code names. The bearded guy doesn't even recognise her. Three of the eleven targets were ex military. A gun from the rafters is unavoidable for even the best if you don't know it's coming.

There are five others who weren't at the meeting though, and they're ex KGB too. A manhunt begins.

They're in Yorkshire, and Natalie Rushman knocks at a cottage door. The garden is overgrown and the damp ankle high grass has wet through her shoes and into her tights.

She smiles sweetly at the big busted woman who answers. 

"Hi, um, Fred said that my friend Alexi was staying here. I'm sorry to bother you, I'm just kinda worried about him."

The woman looks confused and her eyes are wide, "Alexi?" The pause is just a fraction too long, then, "No, no-one by that name here pet." Natalie, Natalia, Natasha holds up a hand like she's in class, and the woman looks at it, confused, as though it's about to do something. She also looks surprised when three men approach from behind the blond girl, and the girl pulls out a small gun and shoots her in the head.

It all goes so well until the last operative. 

Well nearly. One of their two no-names breaks his arm in a fight with #3, so he goes back. It's then her, Petrovich, and un-named 2. The second unnamed operative is a chatty one, for a spy, tells dirty Russian jokes to embarrass her, only out of hearing of the Brits of course. Dirty Jokes wants to sleep with her, but Ivan is there and Dirty Jokes could be killed for it if it affects the mission. So he doesn't try, luckily for him.

The last target was trying to fly out of Edinburgh, (why did they all flee up North as though to high ground?) and so they find him in a railway siding in Glasgow, as you do. Pathetic, Natalia thinks, but he's a fighter. Ivan Petrovich needs to get information out of him for their superiors so the aim is the detain, interrogate, kill, leave. 

Ivan is doing something horrible to the man, who is tied to a pipe in a construction worker's shack. His screams are muffled through an oily dirty rag they found, but it's still loud enough. After each round, Ivan removes it and asks him what he knows. 

But then- 

there's a shot- 

they didn't know about the 6th escapee. Dirty Jokes clutches his arm, his side, and backs out of sight of the glass-less window, staggering. 

Suddenly everything is happening. 

Ivan moves in front of the bound 5th man, and is trying to locate the shooter as Natalia looks at the bound man's face. It's a mask of shock and she knows that either this last man will know everything the bound man doesn't and more, or, he's not related to their mission. Ivan must think the latter.

Petrovich is leaning out of the window with his gun and scope so Natasha grabs Dirty Jokes, who doesn't protest. However, when she pulls her knife from her garter he flinches away, but she's already dug the bullet from his arm and he just clutches it in pain and backs into a wall out of the firing line. 

"It's the same as the others- he's one of them don't shoot him- we can take him."

Ivan knocks her aside, fires into the night. Natalia grits her teeth and knocks his feet out from under him so he crashes into the floor. Before Ivan can do anything she has run to the back of the room and her pistol the bound man's head and shoots, point blank. 

"HE WAS OUR INFORMATION!" Ivan springs back up and advances on her, as she moves away, "You know what will happen if we go back without it? DO YOU?" 

That's when he jerks as though he'd been punched in the gut.

Ivan Petrovich tilts, and leans forwards into her, eyes white and wide and scared as a baby. 

Natalia has lured him into clear sight of the window. 

She falls with him, crumbling, for the last time, under the weight of his body. He's wearing an armoured vest under his jacket, but the shot was such a close range it got through, but luckily, luckily for Natalia, not through him again into her. That was what she had calculated. She just hopes the sniper can't see that. She hopes too, they have fallen enough out of his line of sight.

After a long minute she slides out from under Ivan, trying not to move the body, or at least, to move it as thought it was just sliding down the wall. Out of site of the door and window (both East side) she looks down at her colourful dress and tights- stained with his blood. Too bright. She walks to Dirty Jokes and mimes for him to give her his jacket. He slides it off, wincing . She signs- be still and quiet. He frowns, looks like he might disagree, but he's pale with blood loss so he nods. 

Natalia is 16 and alone. 

The railways is quiet and dirty. It's a clear night so she can see far enough, and in the distance there's a shout of some teenagers messing around. Natalia crouches down behind the pile of concrete sticks, each as thick as a man, the sort of things the tracks are put on. They're just a few meters from the door to the shack, and she hides on the shack side, her pistol cupped in her bloodstained hands. She slows her breathing so she's steady handed and silent. This is yet another risk- what if 6 doesn't come back for the body or to check Dirty Jokes is dead? What if he saw her move from under Petrovich? What if he saw her leave the shack?

Natalia is so, so lucky. Back at the Red Room she's praised, and then thrown in a cold cellar with no sound, no lights, no food or water for three days. They've done much worse to her, it's worth it.

The 6th man returns a few minutes later, gun cocked, warily stepping near silently through the weeds towards the shack. 

Natalia shoots him in his trigger hand. Her aim is perfect. He fights back but when he sees her he's shocked, she's small and cute, and the hesitation has him on his back and her gun in his ear. She missed his temple but like hell is she gonna move it. 

She calls for Dirty Jokes who has crudely bound his arm with what looks like Ivan's shirt (waste not want not). They string the last man up over his dead associate's body. Natalia pretends he's Ivan. It only takes ten minutes. 

Dirty Jokes tells fewer dirty jokes to her on the flight home. 

\---------------------

Natalia is seventeen when she learns James Buchanan Barnes name.

It's her last year of training. She is now a Black Widow. She has red hands and red hair and walks with a self confidence that turns the heads of anyone who'd even had passing thought about women. Ivan Petrovich is dead and she is orphaned for a second time. It's wonderful and freeing, although freedom is not a word in her vocabulary. 

The Black Widow serum is a bastardisation of the Super Soldier serum and it took a few tries to make it work (oh the burning nights and raw throated screams as her body rejected it) but still, she will stay looking 16 for a while, and she's just a little faster, a little stronger, a little sharper than she would have been. Some of the agents say the Winter Soldier had it as well, that he's a widow too, but that doesn't work metaphorically, or logically. No-one knows what the scientists and soldiers did to him but his strength and speed are enough without reason or explanation. Some say he has no fears, not even death, and to Natalia that seems like enough to give him that edge. She saw Ivan's eyes as he died; he was terrified, and that's enough to caution your actions and stay your bravery. 

Natalia still learns tactical skills for combat situations, how to set up and defuse bombs, to obey orders, how to fight blind, how to fight deaf, when and how to make others do the same.

The Winter Soldier is awake for the winter. Now Natalia is one of the main widows, he trains her more and more often. They need to update his arm, they're keeping him off the ice for a little while (who knows how long) so he's there. He has a room in a bunker with his number on the door. He even eats at the canteen. They get used to his silent presence and he's noticeably missing when he's off on missions. 

Natalia is covered in bruises and worse from his metal arm. He's still faster than her and of course stronger. She's barely five foot five and he's well over six- he could hold her with one hand. But, she's learning fast and heals fast. He never speaks to her, really. The longest conversation they had was all those years ago on the roof with the rifles. After each session he just leaves. She is once brave enough to sit with him at dinner but he barely looks at her, and she observes that she's watched for a few days afterwards. 

He is kind, though. He doesn't hit when she's down, well, more than she can take. He gives her breaks, he gives her brief advice, he doesn't loose his temper if she gets a hit in. She works out that one time was instinct, when he threw her across the room. She doesn't surprise him so much anymore. 

Natalia grows more curious. 

She wants to not be scared of death, like he is. She wants to know why he threw her sweets. She wants to know if he's expecting something in return for all his perceived 'favours.' That's how it works? Nothing is free, no-one is kind, nothing is simple. 

One night Natalia sneaks across camp to his room. Other girls do this to other operatives- that's established. 

But, no-one does this to him.

The trip is slow, and cold. She wears her combat shoes and her nightgown; a ridiculous long thing they hand out as regulation nightwear. She also has on her leggings and combat top, so she must look a sight, but her plan isn't on being seen. Quite the opposite. 

By the time she climbs through his window her hands are numb with cold. 

It's late, but he's sitting on his bed, not in it, bare chested but with trousers, arm glinting in the light of the naked tungsten bulb. None of them are allowed to decorate, as such, but his room is as new. No mismatched blankets, cigarette cards or packets, no cup, only a toothbrush on view. 

He sees her as soon as she appears at the window, before she even pushes it open, of course. He doesn't say anything as she drops into his room.

She just stands there.

"Do they ever bug your room?"

"No."

"Why?"

"I have nothing to say."

"They have bugs in mine."

She feels like a child again, and out of habit she's back in his American. Natalia fingers her top, an odd unassertive motion that seems old and alien to her. 

She tries again, "What do you want from me?"

"Nothing."

"No-one wants nothing."

He smirks with white teeth but it doesn't reach his empty eyes, "Then I am no-one."

"Seriously."

"Seriously, hun, not everything has to be a puzzle."

She crosses the small space and sits next to him on the bed. 

He looks at her, and away, "You look ridiculous."

"I can take it off." She tilts her head.

"What do you want?" 

Natalia pauses. Your fearlessness. Your strength. To be you. 

"You. May I please have that?"

He squints his eyes in a confused way, and he looks younger, just for a second.

"Yes Ma'am."

Natalia pushes The Winter Soldier back onto the bed and kisses him. 

Over the next few weeks she visits his room every few days, when she can. She gets to know the route and gets faster, and is never caught. He's always up and always waiting for her, or, at least, just staring into the night. He doesn't like sleeping much, he says, as she coaches more words (and sounds) out of him. That's pretty much his only opinion on most things though. The food is okay, the weather is weather, the ground was muddy in the training field, yes, and? He is a hollow man. Only once, just a few weeks before Natalia's 18th Birthday does he say something that makes her pause, and comes back to her in the night.

She is on top of him, hands round this throat and sucking at his jaw line, when turns and whispers in a voice low with arousal, "James Barnes. James Buchanan Barnes."

She asks him what it is later, and he just nuzzles into her hair uncharacteristically affectionately and whispers again, so low she can barely make it out, "Just something I don't remember."

It goes unsaid that if either of them lets on to any of this they both might not be permitted a memory. She wonders if she should inform on him, but she doesn't.

She uses this name, _James_ , later, and he says back, _Natalia_. He seems pleased with this, like a dog that recognises its name. 

They don't talk about where the name came from, or why both have two names now, Natalia takes it as fact that this is what you get if you're good. She notices his eyes become a little deeper and she thinks it's her. The arrogance of youth. 

The put him back on ice a few weeks later. 

\-----------

Natalia Romanova turns eighteen and is given a black backless dress, high heels so sharp they could scratch the floor, and a veil. She already has all her weapons. She uses this kit a several times as they polish up her training to a fine buff. She comes and goes from the camp as she once saw the Winter Soldier do. 

They meet a few more times- once, memorably after he has returned from a month long absence in disgrace. 

He was meant to be gone a week, and evaded capture for three. He has human eyes the night before they wipe him, and though his block is emptied and guarded round the clock Natalia gets through; they trained her too well. He trained her too well. He is in the middle of the room, but the bed has been thrown against a wall. He has taken apart each bug in each corner. The door is barricaded but she enters by the window.

He doesn't say much because his head won't stop buzzing and his room is personalised now; smashed up and broken. In the middle of it all Natalia traces the scarred seam between man and metal and lets the Winter Soldier shake. She doesn't like this weakness in him, at first, but realises no-one is ever free of the fear, not really. 

He's so panicky and tense he nearly breaks her arm with his metal hand, but she speaks to him in his own voice and sings things she's heard on the radio, in the city, and realises she has nothing to talk to him about that isn't work, and death.

Eventually she pushes him down and curls around him like a protective blanket, he pulls her long curls over his face like a red veil and they just lie.

When she sees him again a week later he's all in black and muzzled, now, and his eyes don't see her. They're too empty to look that far.

When Natalia turns twenty she is wiped and sent into Stark industries with an empty, happy gaze. She's Natalie Rushman again and she never knew anyone called Bucky, never went to Russia.

Truth is so relative.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading?! I haven't read the comics (something I'm trying to rectify) but I love google. Not sure it loves me though. I apologise for typos, though I HAVE gone through it. Wasn't sure how to play with the time period- do you go with the black widow serum and slowing aging so you can change the modern time-line to keep the anti communist American sentiment of the original? That cold war stuff is a little outdated (though some will say it never left) OH NO no politics. :D Basically- I left it all vague. I might carry this on with her in America and so forth, but later. Hope you enjoyed it, anyway. ^^ *BLATHER-NOTES* :D (*throws in my own fanart at the end*)  
> 


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